This indispensable volume contains more than 1,600 poems drawn from dozens of languages and cultures and spans a period of more than 4,000 years. World Poetry encompasses the many realms of poetry: from the ancient epic of Gilgamesh to the haiku of Basho and the dazzling imagery of Li Po; from Vedic hymns to Icelandic sagas to the "Carmina Burana"; from the magnificence of Dante to the lyricism of Goethe and Verlaine; from the piercing insights of Rilke and Yeats to the revelatory verse of Emily Dickinson, Garcia Lorca, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and many more.